On Monday, May 19, travelers at London Heathrow Airport will find themselves racing to catch flights not at "Terminal 5," but instead at "Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5."

The awkward mouthful is the result of a complete branding takeover orchestrated by Samsung to promote its recently released Galaxy S5 smartphone. According to Samsung’s press release, the "revolutionary" rebranding will last for two full weeks and will see all Samsung’s name and branding plastered all over "the signage, wayfinding, website, and every single digital screen at the UK's newest terminal to promote the launch of its iconic Galaxy S5 mobile."

Unless you are actually sight-impaired, it will be impossible to avoid seeing Samsung advertisements while traversing the terminal:

The initiative includes all signage throughout the Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5 terminal—at the entrance and drop-off locations, in the lounges, at security and at the gates. In addition, all 172 digital panels in the main terminal, gate rooms and baggage reclaim areas will feature the rebrand 'Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5' and images of the Galaxy S5 smartphone.

Terminal 5’s page on Heathrow’s website won’t be exempt from the marketing effort; the press release notes that "Online visitors to the Terminal 5 site will also experience a rebranded 'Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5' home page."

According to The Verge, Heathrow Airport spokespersons are sanguine about the marketing effort. "Samsung want to call it Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5," said the spokesperson, "and we are relaxed about that." The spokesperson explained that Samsung hasn’t purchased permanent naming rights to the terminal—the brandsplosion is temporary and tied to Samsung’s larger Galaxy S5 marketing campaign efforts.

Further Reading

Review: Samsung tries to do too much, neglects to finetune design and software for users.

Those marketing efforts are expansive and enormous: the Korean electronics giant’s total advertising budget in 2013 was a ludicrous $14 billion, and even though the company has stated that it would decrease that budget in 2014, it still has billions and billions of marketing dollars to spend. However, whether or not these kinds of overwhelming brand blitzes actually drive any additional revenue for Samsung is a murky question. "The stronger, more differentiated the product, the less it needs to be propped up by advertising," said a former Nokia business manager to Reuters.

The idea of a dead-eyed smiling counter attendant handing over a boarding pass and cheerily announcing, "Sir, your flight will be boarding at gate A1 in Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5!" feels profoundly disturbing; Samsung is digging its fingers deep into your travel experience and forcing you to engage with it. Advertising is already pervasive in airports, with most terminals featuring huge ad posters (most of which seem to be for Barracuda's e-mail management boxes), but in this case Samsung is ensuring that you cannot travel through the terminal without its name and its product's name being spoken at you. Anyone going through "Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5" will have to hear the fully branded name over loudspeakers and see it on their tickets—not to mention all the signage and the 172 digital panels.

Now is probably as good a time as any to point out that when it comes to high-flying branding exercises, Samsung’s got nothing on Japanese drink company Otsuka: that company is getting ready to plant a can of powdered Pocari Sweat sports drink on the surface of the moon as a marketing stunt. Welcome to the future.

Update: It turns out that in spite of the wording of Samsung's press release, the advertising campaign will not affect wayfinding or terminal signage. It will instead be limited to normally-available ad locations. A spokesperson for Heathrow made the following clarification in a statement to iMore.com: "Heathrow Terminal 5's signage and passenger wayfinding has not changed....Samsung have rented advertising space in Terminal 5 with a tongue-in-cheek campaign using the line: 'Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5'."

LOL yeah. I kid you not about 10 minutes ago I was foraging the kitchen for breakfast and ran across something from Korea. It said "forever yum" on it or something like that. Made me LOL. And then I opened Ars.

Korean advertising for the English speaking market is often way off the mark. I kind of like it. Makes me smile.

The idea of a dead-eyed smiling counter attendant handing over a boarding pass and cheerily announcing, "Sir, your flight will be boarding at gate A1 in Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5!" feels profoundly disturbing; Samsung is digging its fingers deep into your travel experience and forcing you to engage with it.

I dunno, anyone who enjoys sports has been dealing with this for a while. The Astros had Enron Field for a couple years. The University of Louisville has the KFC Yum! Stadium. I could go on and on.

Heathrow passenger charge for using T5 is between £21 and £40, depending where you're going (page 40 of this doc). You pay that, part of the "Taxes & charges" bit of your fare. If I was going to be bombarded with that much crap advertising, I'd be looking for that charge to be refunded.

With a 14 billion dollar budget why don't they do something awesome like fund a Mars rover. Call it the Samsung Galaxy rover and make sure there's an on-board camera for lots of selfies with the logo prominently displayed.

When you ask a tagger or graffitist why they do what they do, they often say it's to counter all of the corporate advertising that is awash everywhere you see. I used to think that was bullshit, but actually with this campaign I can kind of see their point now. Samsung is basically tagging the airport.

Ugh. The problem with marketing is that the cost is hidden. An airport thinks, "We could save money by getting [insert corporation here] to pay for part of our costs through a sponsorship deal! That way, we won't have to raise taxes or facility fees!" But all that does is add a level of indirection--now instead of people directly paying taxes or fees to an airport, people are paying higher prices to a corporation that uses those profits to fund their marketing budgets that then go towards that airport (how much of your grocery bill goes to actual food production, and how much of it ultimately ends up paying for your TV shows?). At the end of the day, you're paying for it, one way or the other, except this is less efficient and it grants that corporation extra leverage and power that it did not have before.

And for this reason, I absolutely would not want to see Samsung or any other company sponsor something like a Mars rover--things for the public good should be funded by the public coffer, not sold to private interests.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.